2000-07-05 04:00:00 PDT San Francisco -- Clifford Garrison has a way with women. And their money.

Garrison, who turned 51 on Sunday, has spent much of his life romancing and then swindling a string of wives out of an estimated half million dollars or more, San Francisco authorities say.

Garrison appears polite, well-read and devoutly religious and tells his spouses he is a millionaire computer executive, a golf pro, a guidance counselor, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, an FBI agent.

He buys clothes, computers and watches, leases cars and takes his brides on lavish honeymoons -- all courtesy of current or former spouses' money, authorities say. He has been married at least eight times, and at least five of his wives say they have been victims.

Today, Garrison is to be sentenced in San Francisco to three years in state prison on charges that he swindled wife No. 7, Genevieve Baliantz, and her two children out of their life savings.

But with credit for time served, he will soon be free.

Garrison is already shopping for wife No. 9. From his jail cell, he took out a personals ad in the Bay Guardian, saying he was the CEO of a computer company who was seeking a bride.

The prosecutor in the case doubts that Garrison's latest stint in lockup will change his ways.

"This is a guy who, as far as we know, has been married eight times and who has basically been making his living for the last 10 or 15 years meeting women, marrying them, stealing from them and moving on," said Assistant District Attorney Alan Kennedy. "He is very good at picking out his victims. He finds people who are more trusting perhaps than others."

The 6-foot-3, 200-pound Garrison is "no Don Juan," Kennedy said. "He gets his way some other way than his looks. But the women have said he is very persuasive, and he can be very charming as well."

Henry Doering, the deputy public defender who defended Garrison, declined to comment on the case.

San Francisco police arrested Garrison last year on grand theft charges after he victimized Baliantz. He met her in 1993 at a local church after he got out of San Quentin, where he had been in the prison choir while serving time for victimizing an earlier wife.

"He was just a very good con artist -- he can do things other people don't know how to do," Baliantz said. "He can convince people of anything."

Garrison told her he couldn't stand silence because he would hear the cries of those with whom he had been held prisoner in Vietnam. He told her he had been adopted as a child.

"He was full of stories," she said. He had been sent to San Quentin after he was convicted of defrauding one of his wives in Tiburon in 1992 as well as violating his probation for stealing $39,000 from a golf course. He told Baliantz he had been ''set up" by a previous wife.

Garrison told her he had gotten work as a guidance counselor at San Francisco State University and was designing software for the job. Kennedy said he never worked there.

Garrison convinced his new bride that he should be put in charge of the finances and that the trust fund was not earning enough at the bank.

Garrison then spent the $60,000 himself, creating an elaborate ruse to cover the crime. He printed up phony statements for a purported investment.

"He did all kinds of things," Baliantz said. "He took a loan in my name, and because of that, my salary was garnisheed by a third. It was a disaster."

CHILDREN'S MONEY DISAPPEARED

When she discovered that her children's money was gone, she said, "I was in a state of shock and despair. It was their life savings. It was very important to me as a widow -- I had nothing else to send them to school."

That was the spring of 1995. Garrison tried to convince her that he had sent the money to Germany, where it would earn better interest.

As the evidence mounted, she confronted him. "I looked him straight in the eye and said, 'Where is your conscience?' He looked at me straight and said, 'I have none.'

"I would do anything in my power to warn people about this man," she said. "Women should be aware of who this man is."

In August 1995, Baliantz decided to get a divorce and ultimately got the marriage annulled.

That September, Garrison was arrested for not keeping in touch with his parole officer. Shortly after that, a woman called Baliantz's house asking for Garrison and was told he was in jail.

"She was stunned," Kennedy said. "She said they had been dating for the past month or so.

"That was the next one. She was a lucky one."

At the time he met and wooed Baliantz, Garrison was apparently still married to Stacey Brannan of Tiburon. They had wed in 1991, and without telling anyone, Garrison had used his new sister-in-law's credit card to charge thousands of dollars in honeymoon expenses.

Later, Garrison deposited a bogus $1 million check in an account at Brannan's bank, then wrote several checks off the sum, Kennedy said.

A year before meeting Brannan, Garrison married Sandra Strieter in Michigan. She later said that Garrison had swindled her out of $30,000 by using her credit cards. Strieter reported the matter to police, but Garrison was never prosecuted, Kennedy said.

Before that, Garrison was married to Kim Burgess, a photographer, for two years.

HURRY-UP WEDDING

''We met in '88. He wanted to get married in a hurry," she said. "He had done everything right at the church. He knew all the prayers, the songs -- I fell in love with him."

They lived in Santa Barbara. He told her at one point that he had gotten a job with the FBI. He was also working at a golf course in the exclusive Los Angeles County community of Westlake Village.

"He said he got let go one day," Burgess said. "After a while, he looked at me and warned me that one day, 'People might come and arrest me' -- and they did," for taking $39,000.

Later, she found a bill from a lawyer who had represented Garrison in a divorce she didn't know about. That divorce, she learned, had not been final until after she married Garrison. She got an annulment.

She eventually learned that Garrison had opened accounts in her name and charged $110,000 on her credit cards. Ultimately, Burgess was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Searching through his things, she found personal ad responses indicating that Garrison was seeking a wife.

"Don't be in any vulnerable situation with him," Burgess said. "I'm all for giving people a second situation, a second try, but not with your money or your heart."

STILL MARRIED TO WIFE NO. 8

At least one woman is still married to Garrison. That's Kathy Ricks, wife No. 8, who met Garrison in September 1996 after his marriage to Baliantz was annulled.

Actually, Ricks said, she married him twice. Her own divorce hadn't been finalized the first time.

When they met, he said he was a retired millionaire and pro golfer who had gone to prison for stealing from a golf company. He wined and dined her in a three-piece suit.

"Now that I think about it, that's when the lies started," Ricks said. He said he couldn't pick up the tab for their first date because he hadn't gotten to the bank on time.

When they married in April 1998, Garrison told her the ring he gave her was worth $4,000. It turned out to have been bought for $600 with her own credit card. He also sent flowers that were later billed to her.

She kicked him out of the house they shared with her five children in August 1998 after she discovered that he had set a marriage date with a woman in Huntington Beach.

She later discovered he had lied when he told her that he had put a total of $10,000 into her bank account and that the checks she had written had bounced.

THE KIDS WERE ON TO HIM

"None of this would have happened if I had listened to my kids," she said. "They knew within the first week there was something wrong with him."

"I feel sorry for him," Ricks said. "The thing is, he is so smart, he could actually make a lot of money doing something legal."

And as for his effort to find wife No. 9?

In March, Garrison ran an ad in the personal columns of the Bay Guardian.

It said: "CEO, seeking single white professional woman, age 35 to 50, for walks on the beach, fireside chats and much more."

He said that he owned homes in San Francisco and San Diego and three gymnasiums, and that he ran a multistate computer firm that operated two Learjets.

LINING UP DATES FROM JAIL

"He called me from jail several times and told me the noise in the background was from one of the gyms," a woman who answered the ad said in an interview.

She was suspicious of the ZIP code on one of the letters he sent and later found out he was in jail. He told her that he wanted to get to know someone by mail because he was busy with his company.

"I just kind of treated it as a lark, as a joke," she said. "Now, I feel he is kind of a menace to women who might be vulnerable to a man who appears to be charming, considerate and well read, when he is, in fact, just interested in their money."